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Nov 7, 2009 4:22 PM CST |
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One of the grand traditions of the Cannes Film Festival is that a French film always opens the Festival. This year, the honors went to the new thriller by Dominik Moll, a film called Lemming. The Nordic rodent is the metaphor in this tautly written thriller which is kind of a ménage-a-quatre. The fastidious Alain is an engineer inventing new automation for the home. His most recent invention is a tiny helicopter toy with a camera that can flit about an apartment, controlled by a remote through a computer, to check on any possible catastrophes like water leaks. He has a perfect job which necessitated a move to the south of France, a perfect house in a nondescript suburb, and a perfect and sexy wife, Benedicte. His boss, played by Alain Dussolier, invites himself to dinner one night and arrives with his wife, Alice, played by Charlotte Rampling, who spends the evening hidden behind dark sunglasses. She also creates a terrible scene—accusing her husband of cheating on her, throwing a glass of wine in his face. The dinner becomes a fiasco. It is also the unraveling of the lives of the two parallel couples. As Alice makes her move on Alain one night as he works late at the office, the plot begins to thicken. Then a confused Alice shows up at the house during the day when Benedicte is at home, tells her she has to rest in their spare room, locks herself inside, and commits suicide. Dominik Moll is a masterful teller of suspense, but Lemming ends up being a little too full of red lemmings to succeed. Both in his first feature, With a Friend Like Harry, and now Lemming, it’s obvious that what interests him are the parasitic relationships which develop between individuals. In Lemming, though, the parasitic spider web is cast a little too wide, and unfortunately the only way Moll can figure out a dramatic way to get out of it is to go further and further afield into the realm of the mystical. Lemming ends up with a neat ending, but it is contrived and unsatisfying. The last half of the film meanders, trying to decide in which direction to go. Charlotte Gainsbourg as Benedicte and Laurent Lucas as Alain are both good, but the nuanced performances belong to Dussolier and Rampling as the older couple. The first genuine discovery of the festival is a small first feature by Mexican filmmaker Amat Escalante. Escalanate is only twenty-five years old but his film has a stylistic assuredness that a lot of older filmmakers would envy. The film, Sangre, is in the new minimalist tradition of Latin American cinema already demonstrated by films like the Mexican filmm, Japon, and the Argentine films, La Libertad and Los Muertos. The couple who are at the center of the film here are Diego, a pot-bellied guard at a government building, and his wife, Blanca, who works in a sushi shop. Their life together consists of lying on their sofa watching telenovelas and having sex on the kitchen table. One day Diego’s daughter from a former marriage, Karina, calls, and Diego meets her at a downtown fast food place. She wants to move in with them, but he tells her Blanca will never stand for it, and so he agrees to rent her a room in a hotel. Karina tells him that she has a boyfriend who is a drug dealer, and when Diego goes to see her the next day, he finds her dead of an overdose. At one level, Sangre is a study of weakness. Trapped in the safety of the only comfort zone Diego knows, he is too afraid to confront either his past or the issues in the insecurity of his present marriage. So he moves the body of his dead daughter out of the hotel room in plastic garbage bags and throws it in a dumpster. Then, after coming home and having sex with his wife, he gets up the next morning to uneasily confront both his guilt and alienation. These are sophisticated themes to tackle for a young filmmaker, but Sangre goes a long way to proving that big film budgets don’t translate into good films. In the fledgling Mexican film industry, Escalante’s film is a stunningly strong debut. The gossip and shock here at the opening was seeing Catherine Deneuve walk up the Palais stairs to the opening night screening. This great beauty of the French cinema, who leads a seminar here today in Cannes on film acting, has gained an enormous amount of weight and looks like she is rapidly headed for the territory now occupied by Liz Taylor. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview from Festival de Cannes in Cannes, France. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.\ |
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